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Solid-state storage finds its niche

Still extremely expensive vs. traditional media, solid-state disks can make a convincing economical case for some applications requiring very high IOPS. With the cost of hard disk storage falling to $0.50 per gigabyte or less, the International Securities Exchange (ISE) in New York City decided to buy a 128GB storage system that lists for approximately $85,000 or $664/GB. While that sounds shocking, the company considers it a smart move. "We have a very latency-sensitive application [that handles stock trading], and the storage gives us a distinct competitive advantage," says John Ryan, ISE's technology architecture officer. The solid-state disk (SSD) system from Texas Memory Systems Inc. handles reads and writes in 0.02 milliseconds (20 microseconds), which is orders of magnitude better than the fastest hard disk drives (HDDs). The SSD system that ISE selected is based on double data rate (DDR) DRAM technology and comes integrated with battery backup, a Fibre Channel (FC) interface and conventional hard drives. This SSD ...

Our fifth annual Storage Salary Survey finds that time in the storage trenches is paying off with bigger salaries. However, stress levels and workloads are also rising, as respondents have to manage more storage with less money and increased scrutiny from upper management.

Most new storage arrays automatically distribute data onto a number of spindles, which eliminates the manual task of selecting RAID levels. You can still manually select your RAID levels, but you'll need to balance availability, risks and costs.

Everybody knows they should encrypt tapes that go offsite, but many are still on the fence about where encryption should occur in their storage environments. There are a number of options, ranging from using your backup app's encryption capabilities to installing a purpose-built encryption appliance. We weigh the pros and cons of the available alternatives so that you can decide which approach best suits your shop.

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Web 2.0 tools and strategies hold many potential benefits for businesses that deploy them, but their requirements for rapidly scalable storage and access, as well as persistent data, pose significant challenges for the IT staffs that need to build and manage the infrastructure.

Data center projects often involve migrating data, which is frequently a painful process that can lead to unplanned downtime and outages. It's time to adopt consistent, repeatable migration practices. Selecting the right approach is highly dependent on infrastructure limitations, data and platform types, time constraints and staff capabilities.